Cook’s tour: Harvard wideout Jack Cook leaves Yale’s Deonte Henson in the dust on a third-quarter, 15-yard touchdown. The score gave the Crimson a 28-24 lead, which it would not surrender.Photograph by Tim O’Meara/The Harvard Crimson

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Centennial Medalist Citations

5.28.14

2014 Centennial
Medal Citations

Bruce
Alberts, AB ’60, PhD ’66, biophysics

It would be easy to begin a testimonial
for Bruce Alberts with a list of his achievements as an international advocate
for science. As head of the National Academy of Sciences, as a special
presidential envoy, and as editor of Science
magazine, his influence has reached to the highest levels of global policy.

But to follow
Alberts’s own inclination, it might be best to start locally.

In the early
1980s, when he was already a prominent biochemist at the University of
California, San Francisco, his wife, Betty, was a PTA president in the city’s
public school system, where their children were enrolled. Listening to school
board discussions, Alberts was struck by the glaring disparity in resources
between the city’s schools and the wealthy university in their midst. So he
recruited David Ramsay, then vice chancellor at UCSF, and launched a massive
effort to support the schools, transferring equipment, pedagogical resources,
and people — some 300 graduate students and postdocs a year — under an umbrella
organization called the UCSF Science and Health Education
Partnership, now an internationally recognized model.

Thus began what
could be regarded as Alberts’s second career, one committed to improving the
quality of science education in US schools and connecting the rich resources of
academia with on-the-ground reform efforts. He wanted to rescue science
education from the repetitive drills that dampen excitement; after all, the
projects that thrilled him as a student — learning about television by taking
apart a TV set in eighth grade, contributing to publishable discoveries as an
undergraduate in Paul Doty’s Harvard lab — were experimental and inquisitive, driven
by his own curiosity, not by
memorization.

Alberts had spent
a decade at Princeton before arriving at UCSF in 1976, winning acclaim as a
teacher, a researcher who illuminated the mechanisms of DNA replication, and
one of the original authors of The Molecular Biology of the Cell, the preeminent textbook in the field. But from his earliest
days, even as his energies could have been consumed by his expanding career,
“Bruce was committed to building a scientific community larger
than his own laboratory,” says Marc
Kirschner, Enders University Professor
at Harvard.

He “had a deeply
held conviction that universities like UCSF had the capacity, indeed a duty, to
help improve science education in our schools by forming partnerships between
faculty and teachers,” agrees Ramsay, now UCSF emeritus professor of neurology.

Elected to two 6-year terms as president of the National
Academy of Sciences, Alberts spurred the creation of national standards for
K-12 science education and worked to bring science literacy and leadership to
the developing world. He expanded that work as one of the first three Science
Envoys tapped by President Obama to promote science in Muslim-majority nations;
in that role, he worked extensively in Indonesia to establish a merit-based
funding system for the sciences, comparable to the National Science Foundation.
“Bruce Alberts is truly a citizen of the world,” says Nobel Prize
winner Ahmed Zewail of the California Institute of Technology, a fellow Science
Envoy.

As editor-in-chief of Science, Alberts was able to assess
reform efforts and policy advances around the world. He “brought a unique set of
attributes,” to the role, says Alan Leshner, chief executive officer of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, including “his passion for
improving science education, the respect of top scientists throughout the
world, and his ability to build rapport and trust with leaders in China, India,
and Indonesia.”

Indeed, “Bruce Alberts is one of the most admired figures
in American science,” says Richard Losick, Cabot Professor of Biology. He has used
his several bully pulpits “to promote evidence-based approaches to science
education, inspiring me and countless other colleagues across the country to
devote ourselves as much to teaching effectively as to doing science.”

His career, says Marc Kirschner, “can be best characterized
as combining the highest standards of science with the strongest commitment to
education and a total devotion to public service. There is nothing that Bruce
would not do to advance these causes, and there is nobody else in the US today
who has done so much, from the most fundamental level of mentoring young
scientists and students to the most exalted.”

Bruce Alberts, for your dedication to improving science education throughout the world, and for your visionary leadership of science policy on the national and global stage, we are proud to award you the 2014 Centennial Medal.

Keith Christiansen, PhD ’77, fine arts

The story of Keith Christiansen’s rise
to prominence as one of this country’s most esteemed museum curators begins, appropriately
enough, with an artistic flourish. Waiting in line at the bank, on his last day
of a research trip to Florence in 1977, the young art historian ran into John
Pope-Hennessy, who had just resigned as director of the British Museum. The two
had met after a lecture at Harvard and encountered one another occasionally in Florence;
on this day, Pope-Hennessy revealed that he was moving to the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and invited Christiansen to join his staff. As Christiansen told
the magazine ARTnews earlier this
year, he seized the chance. “My one question,” he said, “was ‘Do you think
this is longer than a one-year opportunity?’”

Thirty-seven
years later, with the Met having answered loudly in the affirmative, the art
world has been deeply enriched by that encounter, and Christiansen holds the
post named for the man who brought him on board. As John Pope-Hennessy Chairman
of European Paintings, he oversees the Met’s world-renowned collection of Old
Masters — seven centuries of individual masterpieces and cultural monuments.
Christiansen has organized these treasures into “watershed exhibitions on topics as
diverse as Mantegna, Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Poussin, and 15th-century
Siena,” revealing a “remarkable curiosity and
intellectual scope,” says Harvard curator Stephan Wolohojian.

Last
year, Christiansen unveiled the first major renovation of the Met’s European
galleries since 1972. The reinstallation creates breathing room, injects
historical and geographical coherence, and offers new opportunities for discovery,
as the New York Times wrote last May,
crediting him with “brilliantly orchestrat[ing] the collection as a play of
dramatic vistas, visual lineups of images — seen around corners or over
distances — that pull you forward in time and immerse you in textured layers of
European culture.”

Most
important, Christiansen was able to expand the number of paintings on view from
450 to more than 700, giving due prominence to the Met’s magnificent collection
— now enhanced by his own wise acquisitions. “Keith
Christiansen is in charge of the outstanding collection in America,” says his
early Harvard mentor, James Ackerman. “The small Duccio Madonna is my favorite,
but the number of great paintings acquired during his tenure is extraordinary.”

Met curator
Andrea Bayer recounts how “the qualities that we most admire about Keith — his
sure eye; his belief that we must always attempt to establish the past history
of a work of art and understand it as a physical object; his love of music and
its intersection with the visual arts; his sense of fun when working with
like-minded colleagues; and an unusual ability to write for both scholarly
peers and the public — all descended upon me like an avalanche when I began
working with him in 1990, on an exhibition about a rediscovered Caravaggio, The Lute Player. I first witnessed then
Keith’s ability to bring to life the work of art and the period in which it was
made through a deep empathy with artists and their sources of inspiration.”

For
Christiansen, art is the greatest learning experience. “Keith is simply a great
teacher — and I have never taken a class with him!,” says his friend, the
prominent private collector Jon Landau. “When we have looked at art
together, I have always come out of the church, or palazzo, or museum with
more knowledge, insight, and visual sensitivity than when I went in.”

“What would be an antonym for Keith
Christiansen, I asked myself? Three came to mind: obsequious, guarded, and indifferent.

It follows that I never needed to ask Keith what he
thought about a picture or an issue, for I was never in doubt. If an issue, his
opinion was offered with occasionally distressing candor and only the slightest
nod to deference. This is why it counted for so much.

If a picture, well, there could be no doubt; so
physically, almost operatically, did he punctuate his enthusiastic dithyrambs
with grand gestures – and bright green socks to match.

Keith’s walking stride is so long he is a step ahead
of most of us — and that is as good a metaphor as any for Keith.

Keith Christiansen, for your remarkable stewardship of one of the world’s preeminent artistic collections, and for communicating the grandeur of art with boundless energy, wise insight, and good humor, we are proud to award you the 2014 Centennial Medal.

Judith Lasker,
PhD ’76, sociology

It is rare in academia for an eminent scholar to be as
personally cherished — by undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty at all
levels— as is Judith Lasker. But then, Lasker has always combined the personal
and the intellectual, viewing her academic work as intimately connected to the
real world and to the emotional lives of those around her. Through unique
studies of experiences of pregnancy loss, infertility, and chronic illness, to
her current research on international volunteerism, “Judith Lasker has
consistently been using a rich sociological imagination,” says Barbara Katz Rothman,
professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New
York. “She connects troubles to issues, individual concerns to larger social
problems – and engages with the search for solutions. Her work truly
is a contribution to both our scholarship and our humanity.”

Judith Lasker is
N.E.H. Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Lehigh University. Through the
1980s and beyond, she undertook what proved to be a groundbreaking exploration
of women’s health and reproductive lives. Her first book on the subject was When Pregnancy Fails: Families Coping with
Miscarriage, Ectopic Pregnancy, Stillbirth and Infant Death. From that
work, she developed a quantitative tool to assess the effects of pregnancy
loss, called the Perinatal Grief Scale, now widely used, and she conducted
domestic and international studies that made a major contribution to the
literature on grief and bereavement. Later in that same decade, she published In Search of Parenthood: Coping with
Infertility and High Tech Conception, part of a body of work exploring the
social and ethical dimensions of new reproductive technology. Her work on those
subjects “was
influential well beyond sociology, in global health,” says medical
anthropologist Arthur Kleinman, Rabb Professor at Harvard.

She began to
explore the sociological meanings of chronic illness when her friend Ellen
Sogolow, a former research scientist with the Centers for Disease Control, contracted a rare liver disease. As
Sogolow recounts, Lasker immediately did two things: she offered to be a living
donor and she tackled the problem scientifically. In Sogolow’s words, Lasker
“partnered with patient groups and hospitals to amass the single largest
international sample of persons with this rare disease ever studied from a
social sciences perspective. In the following years, while my contribution was
less over time, she completed this work and published many papers that gave new
attention to a rare disease, and led to new understandings of the powerful
roles of family and friends as well as health care providers in management of
chronic illness.”

After exploring
issues related to alternative currencies, social capital and health, and
community-building, some of which resulted in her book Equal Time, Equal Value, Lasker has returned to a topic that has
interested her since her Harvard days — global health, and particularly women’s
health. In a forthcoming book, she is exploring the impact of short-term
American volunteering in international health-care settings, assessing the
effectiveness of this growing trend.

“Judy and I had the
good fortune to be in Ezra Vogel’s comparative international sociology program,
which celebrated dissertation research in Africa, the Middle East, the USSR,
and Asia,” recalls Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, professor of global health and
social medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Judy went to the Ivory Coast; I
went to Azerbaijan, Iran. During our dissertation writing, we
exchanged stories from the field, including hair-raising ones. Judy, always
compassionate and caring, devoted her life’s work to women’s health.”

“Judy is the
complete professor,” says her Lehigh colleague, Professor James McIntosh, one
of many colleagues to praise her university role. She is “an excellent
teacher-professor in the best sense of the phrase. She determinedly pursues
answers to serious questions in her research, and at the same time brings
numbers of students into the tent of the scholarly process.”

Her friend Ellen
Sogolow provides an apt summary of this unique scholar. “From her teaching and
research, Judy’s legacy will span generations. From her personal strength, her
reach already is vast, in ways that perhaps science does not measure. Dr.
Judith Lasker shines a bright light on how very much one person can accomplish
with one lifetime.”

Judith Lasker, for never forgetting the human impact of your scholarly research, and for selflessly supporting your students and colleagues in their academic, professional, and personal development, we are proud to present you the 2014 Centennial Medal.

Leo
Marx, SB ’41, PhD ’50, history of American
civilization

It is perhaps the highest honor for a
scholar: A line of inquiry that you developed, tracing connections previously
uncharted, becomes a book that changes your field, spawns new ways of thinking,
captures the Zeitgeist, and yet
remains startlingly contemporary over the decades.

Such was the
trajectory of ideas first articulated by Leo Marx in his Harvard thesis and
then in his seminal work of American studies, The
Machine in the Garden.
Exploring tensions between the pastoral and the industrial in Hawthorne,
Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, the book seemed to predict America’s current
unease about the role of technology, the degradation of the environment, and
its own sense of possibility. It has been in print continuously in the fifty years
since its debut in 1964.

“At this point in American history, it is unimaginable to
talk about anything of substance without talking about technology, the
environment, and the American dream,” says Rosalind Williams, Bern Dibner
Professor of the History of Science and Technology at MIT. “This book was out
in front. It was about environment and technology before those two words became
defining words of American consciousness.”

Leo Marx is Senior
Lecturer and William R. Kenan Professor of American Cultural History Emeritus
in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. He arrived there in
1976, after stints at the University of Minnesota and Amherst College, to help
found the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

His
body of writings has helped to define an area of American studies concerned
with the intermingling of science, technology, literature, and culture. His
books — which include The Pilot and the Passenger and the edited collections Does
Technology Drive History? (with Merritt Roe Smith), ) and Progress:
Fact or Illusion? (with Bruce Mazlish) — raise fundamental questions
about American identity.

“Few scholars can claim to have invented a new field, fewer
still to have done so with a work that still breathes freshness after fifty
years. Leo Marx has done both,” says Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor at
Harvard. “His Machine in the Garden is a foundation stone of
American cultural studies and of science and technology studies, essential
reading for anyone who wants to understand American thought about the relations
between nature and technology.”

Marx’s legacy is
as a “great scholar, a great teacher, and an even finer human being,” in the
words of Roe Smith, MIT’s Cutten Professor of the History of Technology — an
assessment that is widely shared. “When I arrived at Amherst College in 1974,
Leo Marx was already a distinguished scholar and teacher,” recalls Austin
Sarat, Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst.
“He also was a leader on the faculty, exemplifying an intellectual acumen and
breadth of interest that set a standard for his colleagues. I recall many
conversations with my peers during which we marveled at Leo’s example,
wondering all the while whether any of us would ever be able to be like Leo.
But we all also knew that Leo was truly one of a kind!”

That has remained
true throughout his career. His longtime friend Jill Ker Conway, a colleague in
the program in Science, Technology and Society in the late 1980s, recalls his distinct
strengths as a teacher. “STS was a graduate program, and most of its students
whose training was scientific struggled initially with the language of
philosophy, history, and sociology. Leo is a master teacher who can translate
disparate ways of thinking with such fluency and ease that even the most
anxious students soon mastered ways of thinking such as deconstruction, and
could be overheard arguing vigorously over the finer points. It was always a
delight to observe his impact on students, because he made it clear that the
notion of the ‘Two Cultures,’ popularized by C. P. Snow, did not exist for him.
I never ceased to
be astonished by the breadth of his interests, which crossed a broad sweep of
disciplines.”

That breadth of scope helped fuel the deep and
continuing impact of his masterwork. “Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden reads as freshly relevant in 2014 as it did
in 1964,” says Joyce Chaplin, Phillips Professor of Early American History at
Harvard. “As realization dawns that concerns about the environment and of the
impact of human technology upon it are problems that will not go away, it is
extraordinary to realize that Marx put nature and technology into the study of
American culture from the start. He was right then, and he’s right now.”

Leo Marx, for your foresight in predicting the challenges of contemporary American life, and for your wisdom in helping generations of students make sense of those challenges, we are proud to award you the 2014 Centennial Medal.